ACME Labs Pure-JavaScript Games

For the past few years I've been thinking that JavaScript running in a web browser on a modern computer, when considered as a computing platform, is about as powerful as a PC from say the mid-1980s. Therefore any game we enjoyed back then should be implementable in JavaScript today.

But why not use Flash, you say? Flash has security holes, version issues, and is not universally available. Aside from that, sure, the same logic applies.

A couple of problems with JavaScript as a games platform:

• No sound. Games are much more exciting with sound. I've seen a hack that uses a tiny Flash app as a sort of sound server, called from JavaScript just to deliver sounds. That might be an acceptable level of Flash use. Or perhaps there's a way to do the same thing with a tiny Java app, since Java has fewer issues than Flash.
• Keyboard rollover issues. If you try to press two keys at the same time, on many systems the keydown event for the second key won't fire until the first key gets released.

Anyway, here are the games! Only one so far, a re-implementation of the first video game of all:

• Space War

ACME Labs / Games